No downtime for Uptime as it retools its software for virtual, distributed IT
Analyst: Rachel Chalmers, Karin Kelley
Sector: Enterprise Software »»
Date: 2 Mar 2009
Event summary
Uptime positions itself as a fast-deploying single pane of glass for deep insight into enterprise infrastructure. New in its flagship product, up.time: distributed architecture, full virtual monitoring and service-level monitoring (SLM).
The distributed architecture now allows enterprise-wide service availability and performance from one dashboard, with the ability to manage and monitor applications and services running across multiple geographies and datacenters.
The software controls virtual sprawl by dynamically discovering and tracking instances, pointing to places where VM density may be optimized. Add SLM and that takes days, not weeks, to deploy, and Uptime thinks its value proposition is strong.
The 451 take
Uptime sees its product as a system, virtual machine and SLA monitor, configuration auditor and dependency-mapping tool, with chargeback, event correlation and capacity planning. It can implement ITIL and other best practices, fire off security and end-user performance alerts, play nicely with legacy Patrol, Tivoli, OpenView and so on and take actions like provisioning or log management. That’s a broad mandate, and it brings Uptime into competition with plenty of potential or actual partners in performance management, configuration management, runbook automation, capacity planning and elsewhere. That said, the company has a great story to tell customers with heterogeneous environments and increasingly urgent virtualization management needs.
Details
In 2000, Toronto-based Uptime Software shifted its focus away from the consultancy business it had founded in 1997 and released the first version of its systems management software, up.time. Today, the company claims more than 600 global client installations, with 75% of that base in North America and 25% throughout the rest of the world. With an overall average deal size of $25,000 in 2008, Uptime touts an increase from a $13,000 deal average in the beginning of the year to $40,000 by the fourth quarter.
Current customers span federal and state government agencies, financial institutions, telcos, IT firms and online retail shops, with others in manufacturing, education, health, media, energy and transportation. Customers include the Bank of Montreal, Telekom Malaysia, the Defense Information Systems Agency, Queensland Health and Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide. Self-funded Uptime’s employee count increased 35% in 2008 to 50, 15 of those in research and development. To fortify its market position going forward, in December 2008 the company brought on board a new director of marketing, Saeed Khan. Khan, who hails from Novell via its acquisition of PlateSpin earlier in the year, joins a management team that consists largely of Sun Microsystems veterans.
Uptime’s technology partners include Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Red Hat, Citrix, BEA Systems and Novell. The company also has alliances with Tevron and Splunk Inc. It’s seeking additional partners to fill gaps around enterprise infrastructure monitoring and resource and capacity modeling. Uptime markets itself as both a pure-play virtual infrastructure management vendor and an add-on layer to existing management stacks.
Competitive landscape
The company classes its competitors in six buckets. At the top are the Big Four enterprise systems management vendors – BMC Software, CA Inc, HP and IBM – plus Microsoft. These hold more than 60% of the market, but Uptime believes it can play nicely with them by filling technology gaps around virtualization, for example. Next come mid-tier players like Compuware, Managed Objects, NetIQ and Quest Software. Here, Uptime claims to be doing a roaring trade in rip and replace. The third bucket, which the company calls ‘value-ware,’ is its own traditional market. Its competitors there, EG Innovations and Nimsoft, have also jumped on the virtualization bandwagon and should not be underestimated as threats.
Uptime is less concerned about what it calls ‘point-ware,’ including Akorri, BMC BladeLogic, Coradiant, EMC Smarts, HP Opsware, HyPerformix, Novell PlateSpin, Oblicore, Opalis Software, Opnet Technologies, Splunk, Symantec Altiris, Tideway Systems, Tealeaf Technology and VMware. We’d be less complacent there. The same applies to the fifth bucket. For example, Hyperic, which Uptime classes alongside GroundWork Open Source, Numara Software, Solarwinds and Watchtower under ‘volume-ware,’ is in our view considerably more than that. It’s definitely fair to say, though, that up.time is a good maturity replacement for freeware like Big Brother or Nagios in Uptime’s sixth bucket.
ShareThis
Subscribe to this post's comments
